A Little More Stupid

Well...it was research, I told myself.

The morning started with a long conversation with Ellen and Shelly about the events of yesterday, as we all sat surfing the internet to find out how many places we could find that printed pictures of them. (A lot, as it turns out! The biggie, of course, was the photo in the New York Times, but they've received email from everywhere saying that they are carrying their photo. Jeri wrote saying they were in The Boston Globe, someone said they were in the Wall St. Journal. I even found a photo in an Australian newspaper...and who knows where else. They were apparently the only couple who showed up with signs--the same signs they have been carrying at every Marriage Equality rally, and so it made them the darling of the photographers from all over the country).

[funny aside: Hibbert Lumber, one of our two lumber stores, called them saying how pleased they were to see that the photo in the Sacramento Bee showed that Ellen's sign was attached to one of Hibbert's yardsticks. I don't think they had seen that the photo was the entire front of the San Francisc Chronicle!]

Anyway, the e-mails kept flying back and forth among people and one of the e-mails was from someone who linked to the Ellen Degeneres show web site, with a video clip of her announcement, on the heels of the court decision, to marry her partner, Portia DeRossi. I watched the video and then noticed a link on the web site.

I've been on the web site before and I know she has fun games that you can play, so when I saw that it was an "Instant IQ test," I didn't notice that it appeared in the advertisement section, not in the games section. I clicked on it out of curiosity. Mary had mentioned taking a Free IQ test on Facebook recently that she found very frustrating. Her entry is called "It's a Crummy Commercial." But this was Ellen. Would Ellen lure me into such a dupe?

So I took the test, rather proud of myself that I even answered the damn "A train leaves point A..." question. It was 7 pages of what seemed like legitimate IQ test questions. At least they were questions that made me think (and also showed, what I knew already, that my skills lay in language and not in mathematics or critical thinking).

Each page ended with a question about some bit of personal information -- your age, your zip code, your gender, your e-mail address, your phone number. I used the zip code of the house I grew up in, my father's birth date (but my year), and the phone number of the house I grew up in. I set up a fake e-mail account at Yahoo to mail the results (used my father's name, feminized). I get enough spam as it is without whatever this "test" was going to give me. I'm no dummy!

I finally got through all 7 pages of the test and clicked to get my results and was tumbled, like Alice through the rabbit hole, into a quagmire of "offers," "surverys" and outright advertisements.

First there were the one-page "offers" of wonderful things you could get and the option to accept or pass (each one was going to cost you something, of course). Then it went into the "surveys" which were initially described as demographic, but which were just long list after list after list of offers to subscribe to offers like "Sump News" (for the homeowner with a sump pump -- really!). You couldn't just click "no" on all the offers, but had to accept at least one. (Naturally on the sump page, I chose Sump News.) Then you were given a subsequent advertisement for whatever you had clicked and when you clicked "no" you were then given another long list of offers that you had to accept or decline.

Like Mary, I was beginning to wonder if part of the IQ test was determining exactly how long a subject would sit there clicking "no" to endless offers of things they want to send you.

But I did notice that there was a little progress bar at the top of my screen, so I decided that I was getting near the end and would keep clicking "no" over and over again (I'm sure I did it for more than five minutes).

When at last I reached the end of the little progress bar, guess what...another progress bar popped up and you were supposed to start all over again. I decided that this was going to be an endless exercise in futility and I would never ever get my IQ score.

But when I closed down the screen, and went to close down my fake e-mail account, to my surprise, my IQ score was there. And it does indicate that I've lost a few points since high school.

They were extremely secretive about IQ scores when I was in high school. Giving someone her score was akin to violating today's HIPAA rules for medical information. However, I worked in the school office and was able to sneak a peak at my own IQ score and discover that it was 137, a decent level. But I'm only 132 today. I'm convinced it's because each time I clicked on another page of offers it lopped a point or two off of my total score.